They forced Japan to open its doors. Then blamed anyone who walked through.
February 15, 1907: The U.S. government, facing anti-Japanese backlash in California, pressured Japan to stop sending laborers, and called it the “Gentlemen’s Agreement.”
In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Edo Bay with warships and an ultimatum. Japan, under the Tokugawa shogunate, had maintained more than two centuries of relative isolation under its sakoku policy. American gunboat diplomacy shattered that order.
Trade treaties followed. So did migration.
Ironically, Japan’s closed-door “sakoku” policy had limited outward migration at a time when anti-Chinese sentiment was already erupting in the United States. But especially after the Meiji Restoration accelerated modernization and global engagement in 1868, Japanese laborers began arriving in Hawai‘i and the American West. They worked in agriculture and railroads. They filled labor shortages. They leased land others would not farm. They built communities from almost nothing.
Then resentment followed.
Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art
Commodore Matthew C. Perry, whose 1853 arrival in Edo Bay marked the beginning of the end of Japan’s two-century closed-door policy under the Tokugawa shogunate.
Courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art
Emperor Meiji, whose reign marked the Meiji Restoration, a period of rapid modernization that transformed Japan from a feudal society into an industrial world power.
Courtesy of the Marilyn Blaisdell Photograph Collection
The city simply renamed the existing “Chinese Primary School” to “Oriental Public School,” lumping Japanese and Korean children in with Chinese students.
Success Becomes a Threat
In California, Japanese immigrants developed reputations for discipline and efficiency. They reclaimed swampland. They improved crop yields. They leased marginal farmland and turned it profitable.
White labor unions and nativist politicians framed them as economic threats. Newspapers amplified fears of the “yellow peril.” Segregation efforts intensified.
In 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education voted to force Japanese children into segregated schools alongside Chinese students. Japan protested. Diplomacy strained.
President Theodore Roosevelt intervened, not to affirm equality, but to prevent an international incident.
The solution was quiet pressure on Japan.
The Agreement That Wasn’t a Law
The 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement was never passed by Congress. It was an informal understanding between governments.
Japan, determined to avoid a formal exclusion law like the Chinese Exclusion Act and the humiliation of continued segregation, agreed to stop issuing passports to laborers seeking entry into the continental United States.
In exchange, the federal government persuaded San Francisco to rescind its school segregation order and avoided passing explicit anti-Japanese exclusion legislation. At least for the moment.
The agreement still allowed wives and family members to join men already in America. This led to the arrival of so-called “picture brides,” strengthening and expanding Japanese American communities. But the message was unmistakable: you may work here, but you do not belong here.
Courtesy of British Columbia Archives
An anti-Chinese poster announcing the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, May 6, 1882, courtesy of British Columbia Archives
Courtesy of California State Parks
An unexpected loophole of the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907: Picture Brides. Japanese women were allowed to immigrate to the U.S. to join husbands they decided to marry.
Credit Library of Congress
President Calvin Coolidge signing the Immigration Act, a.k.a. the “Johnson-Reed Act,” effectively ending most immigration from Japan and other Asian nations.
Photography by Dorothea Lange
The Mochida family of Hayward, California, awaiting removal to an incarceration camp. May 8, 1942
Things Only Got Worse
Anti-Asian sentiment wasn’t slowing down. First came diplomatic pressure. Then informal restriction. Then state-level land bans. Then federal exclusion.
In 1913, California passed the Alien Land Law, targeting Japanese immigrants who were barred from citizenship under federal naturalization laws.
In 1924, Congress ended immigration from Japan entirely through the Johnson-Reed Act.
Three decades later, 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry would be incarcerated during World War II.
The pattern was not sudden. It was built. Step by step.
A Convenient Memory
The Gentlemen’s Agreement allowed the United States to claim it had not enacted racial exclusion. Japan could claim it had acted voluntarily.
Both governments saved face.
Immigrants paid the price.
The United States had forced Japan open in the 1850s. When Japanese workers arrived, it treated them as intruders rather than participants in a system America had demanded.
History often remembers the warships. It forgets the quiet agreements. Especially the ones that were never meant to last.
Courtesy of Portsmouth Athenae
Theodore Roosevelt, fresh off a Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, he was not going to humiliate Japan with a public exclusion law.
Matthew Perry’s second fleet to Japan, 1854. The return of the Black Ships forced the Tokugawa shogunate to open Japan, unleashing a Pandora’s box of global change.